John Corcoran is a recovering attorney, an author, and a former White House writer and speechwriter to the Governor of California. Throughout his career, John has worked in Hollywood, the heart of Silicon Valley, and ran his boutique law firm in the San Francisco Bay Area, catering to small business owners and entrepreneurs.
Since 2012, John has been the host of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where he has interviewed hundreds of CEOs, founders, authors, and entrepreneurs, including Peter Diamandis, Adam Grant, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Marie Forleo.
John is also the Co-founder of Rise25, a company that connects B2B businesses with their ideal clients, referral partners, and strategic partners. They help their clients generate ROI through their done-for-you podcast service.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [02:23] John Corcoran discusses productivity hacks from Automate Your Busywork book
- [04:31] The best way to discover new tools that can simplify your daily tasks
- [06:18] How adopting new tools eliminates repetitive tasks in business
- [07:09] A little-known hiring tool that saves time and reduces recruiting costs
- [09:12] How mentorship and collaboration with industry leaders drive business growth
- [11:02] The impact of AI on podcasting and content creation today
- [13:51] Pros and cons of using AI for podcast show notes and content generation
In this episode…
Running a business comes with countless challenges, from building meaningful relationships to staying productive and managing repetitive tasks. Many entrepreneurs struggle to balance strategic growth with the day-to-day operational grind, often feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of busy work. How can you transform your business operations with the right tools and strategies to streamline processes while maintaining a human touch?
John Corcoran shares his insights on overcoming these challenges by leveraging automation and relationship-building strategies. He emphasizes using tools like JazzHR to simplify hiring processes and AI-driven solutions to automate mundane tasks, freeing time for more creative and strategic work. By focusing on meaningful connections and utilizing the right technology, entrepreneurs can grow their businesses without getting bogged down in operational inefficiencies.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as Chad Franzen interviews John Corcoran, Co-founder of Rise25, about leveraging technology and relationships for business success. They discuss essential tools that can help entrepreneurs save time, the power of building strong professional relationships, and the evolving role of AI in content creation. By the end of the episode, listeners will learn about emerging technologies that can revolutionize business operations.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Special Mention(s):
- Automate Your Busywork: Do Less, Achieve More, and Save Your Brain for the Big by Aytekin Tank
- Jason Swenk on LinkedIn
- Smart Agency Masterclass
- JazzHR
- Google NotebookLM
Related Episode(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “For me, the number one thing in life is relationships, and I’m always looking for ways to give to my best relationships.”
- “We’re excited about new technologies that can allow us to get mundane work off our plate and engage in more stimulating activities.”
- “You should devote a portion of your week to becoming aware of different tools that exist to save time and increase efficiency.”
- “AI for show notes and content creation will allow us to take different tools and speed them up faster, which is a great thing.”
- “I absolutely don’t think AI will replace the human-to-human connection and real value from doing the actual podcast myself.”
Action Steps:
- Embrace automation tools: Start integrating automation tools like ChatGPT and JazzHR into your daily workflow to handle repetitive tasks more efficiently. This approach allows you to focus on more creative and strategic activities, solving the challenge of time-consuming busywork.
- Dedicate time to discover new tools: Allocate a portion of your week to explore and learn about new technological tools and applications. By doing so, you can stay ahead with solutions that streamline tasks, directly addressing the challenge of being unaware of tools that could simplify your work.
- Leverage AI for content creation: Utilize AI tools for creating podcast show notes and other content more consistently and quickly. This can improve your content production process by generating high-quality output.
- Build strong relationships with industry leaders: Engage with mentors and network within your industry to enhance your knowledge and gain insights. This helps overcome the challenge of facing business hurdles alone, providing access to valuable advice and strategies.
- Maintain human oversight in AI processes: Ensure that there is always human quality control over AI-generated content to uphold quality and relevance. This addresses the potential issue of AI inconsistencies, ensuring that your output maintains a professional standard.
Sponsor: Rise25
At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 100 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution.
We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.
What do you need to start a podcast?
When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.
The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate.
We make distribution easy
We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. We’ll also create a copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.
Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk, and many more.
The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.
Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.
Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agency that wants you to win?
Contact us now at [email protected] or book a call at rise25.com/bookcall.
Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.
Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:02
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show. Welcome everyone. Chad Franzen here I am, the host of today’s show, the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. Great to have you.
You know, if you’ve listened before that each week, John Corcoran, the regular host, features smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs of companies and organizations like Netflix, Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard, LendingTree, OpenTable, and many more. John, great to talk to you today.
John Corcoran: 00:45
Yeah, Chad, I’m excited to be here. And before we get into the topic for today, of course, this is brought to you by Rise25, our company where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? You know, we do that by helping you to run your podcast. We are the easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast.
We do three primary things: a three legged stool strategy, accountability, and full execution on the production. So you know, Chad, you know, we like to kind of joke that Rise25 is the team of magic elves running in the background, making it look easy for any company and host so they can create amazing content and amazing relationships and most importantly, run their business. You know, and for me, you know, the number one thing in life is relationships. And I’m always looking for ways to give to my best relationships. And I found that there’s no better way over 15 years of doing this now than profiling the companies and the people that I most admire and respect and share what in the world that they have going on with the people that I know.
So if you’ve ever thought about doing a podcast for business, you should do it. If you have any questions, you can go to Rise25.com or email us at. [email protected]. All right, Chad, what are we talking about today?
Chad Franzen: 02:02
Yeah, we are going to talk about some of your some things that are going on with you, a recent book, maybe that you’re reading or that you’ve read a little known tool that you use, someone in your network that has impacted you and an issue in your industry. Why don’t we get started with a recent book, what’s a what’s a recent book? Maybe that you’ve read that you’d like to share with the rest of us?
John Corcoran: 02:23
Yeah, I just finished reading over Automate Your Busy Work by I believe it’s pronounced Aitken Tank, and he’s the founder of Jotform, which is a great company and a client of ours. And this book is really about using tools and apps and technologies that have come along to allow you to engage in the most, highest and most creative work that you can do by getting things off of your plate. And every day there’s so much stuff that we do, whether it’s checking email, whether it’s something manual like downloading a file or backing up something. There’s a lot of busy work that we do that, you know, it’s hard to lose. It’s very easy to lose track of the fact that we can do these things faster.
Now, I’ll give you an example. I was just talking to one of our team members a couple of days ago, and I wanted to have a speaking engagement coming up in Seattle, and I wanted to create a list of all the people that are attending. And there’s a couple of ways that you could do it. The old way of doing it is looking at the list of attendees, which was digital but wasn’t in the right format that I wanted. She could have typed out every name.
You know that. The hard part about that is that it takes a lot of time. It’s manual. You might have typos, things like that, so it might not be totally accurate. Instead, what I had her do was just take a screenshot of it, upload it, upload it to ChatGPT, and then transcribe it and alphabetize it, and all this stuff happened in seconds.
And so that’s an example of something that could take a long amount of time. But you know new tools have been around in just the last couple of years. We don’t many of us don’t even know that these things exist and can save you a lot of time. So that was the point of that book, was to increase your awareness of these different tools that exist to allow us to engage in the highest and most creative work that we can do.
Chad Franzen: 04:21
How do you think people can find out about, you know, tools, tools that could help them do things that are everyday work that they never would have thought of? Oh, something can do this for me.
John Corcoran: 04:31
That’s a $1 million question. You know, I mean, you and.
Chad Franzen: 04:34
Jeremy is always finding new tools.
John Corcoran: 04:37
That. Yeah, I guess, you know, he and I love that kind of stuff. We love hearing about these, you know, different tools that have come out that can speed up some processes. And, and I think maybe it’s just at its core, it’s not loving doing tasks that are laborious and tedious. Right.
You know, So the more that we can move towards tools that allow us to get those things off of our plate, I think the better off we are. You know, I mean, if you go back not that long ago, go back 100 years. We had, you know, elevator operators that were sitting in an elevator, you know, with a crank all day long up, down, up, down, you know. Today that seems silly. But when the technology came along to, you know, eliminate that position, I’m sure people were up in arms or probably, you know, elevator operator unions that were furious about it said it wasn’t safe and things like that.
But, you know, that was a very laborious, mundane type of work, you know. And so it freed up that person to go do something better with their time. So, yeah, I think that’s ultimately at its core is just that we’re excited about new technologies that can allow us to get mundane work off of our plate and engage in more stimulating types of activities.
Chad Franzen: 05:54
Okay. Very interesting. So when you guys, when you guys, when you guys first started or when you, as you, you’re trucking along, you know with rise 25 and there’s a task that you found repetitive and you at some point like you’re like, I’m just sick of doing this. Have you heard of all the tools that you guys have kind of adopted along the way, or did you Google like, how do I, you know, not have to send a manual email every single time I send an email, you know, something like that.
John Corcoran: 06:18
Sometimes it’s just stumbling across a tool. Someone mentions that they’re using a tool in a particular way. And so you’re like, oh, great, I could use that. Other times it is something where it’s like, hey, this takes a lot of effort. It seems like there should be a tool that could help speed this up.
So it really kind of varies depending on what the activity is. I think increasingly these days it’s it’s we should all devote a portion of our week to, you know, becoming aware of different tools that exist, because otherwise we’ll just be like our team member that, you know, would be just typing up those names rather than getting something done in seconds, and then being able to move on to more stimulating activities.
Chad Franzen: 07:02
Okay, speaking of little known tools, what’s one that maybe you’ve found yourself using recently that you’ve grown an appreciation for?
John Corcoran: 07:09
I don’t know if this is little known or not, but jazz HR is a tool that we use. It’s a hiring tool. It’s a hiring and recruiting tool. It’s technically called an applicant tracking tool. And so it’s for hiring people to your company.
And before this we had to put job posts in different places. We would draft a job post and then manually post it in multiple different places, which means you had to go into different platforms, you had to log in, you had to remember your password, you had to, you know, type it up and put it into their system. You had to post it, maybe pay a fee or something like that. And then people had to apply. And so we’d have an application link.
You’d use a type form or something like that. They would fill it out. Then that would generate a bunch of responses. Those would then go into a spreadsheet. It was just a very convoluted process. And then we’d have to manually send emails and follow ups and stuff like that. And so JazzHR takes all of that and puts it into one system. So you create one job description in one place. It goes and is posted onto a career section on your own website. It also gets syndicated across all these different places.
We actually found that our job recruiting costs went down because we were spending a lot of money before paying to be on all these different job boards. Afterwards, what we found is that we didn’t have to pay these fees as much because we’d syndicated across all these different places without having to pay a fee, even though the software ain’t cheap. You know, it costs a couple thousand dollars a year. We found that our overall cost went down when we switched to using this tool. In addition to just making it so much more efficient so we can hire a lot faster.
There are other applicant tracking tools out there. We looked at a bunch of them when we were deciding on which one we wanted to use, and we settled on JazzHR, and it’s been a great choice for us. I think we’ve been using it for about maybe 4 or 5 years now.
Chad Franzen: 09:04
Okay. Very nice. As I mentioned, we want to talk about someone in your network who has impacted you, who has made a recent impact on you that’s in your network.